Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterSoldiers? Or Bug Meat? Starship Troopers Battle Some Big, Bad Insects
Jan 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Ellen Wolff
When novelist Robert Heinlein penned the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers, he envisioned epic battles between humans and thousands of giant bug-like creatures. To bring that vision to the screen for Tri Star Pictures, director Paul Verhoeven called on the animators at Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, led by two-time Oscar winner Phil Tippett. For 217 shots, Tippett's team created around 10,000 animated creatures-a number that's feasible today only because of CGI.
As Starship Troopers builds towards its climactic battle, there's a pivotal scene where the humans' fortifications are breached by a massive "Tanker Bug." While the huge creature smashes through the side of the fort, sending sheared metal flying, hordes of "Warrior Bugs" start to scale the falling wall. Tippett Studio visual effects supervisor Craig Hayes, who designed the Tanker Bug, calls this shot "the final breach. The big guy has just opened the door for all the bugs to come swarming in."
One of the biggest challenges involved in this shot was how to wreck the wall so that it would appear that the Tanker Bug was actually causing the destruction. Since the scene takes place in broad daylight, it would be very noticeable if the CGI animation wasn't believably integrated.
Craig Hayes recalls that "early on in production, we went through a couple of different options. There was definitely the temptation to actually break a full-scale fort wall, but that gets into a lot of elaborate rigging. You can spend a lot of time on a set trying to rig a wall to get a take, and then have to spend another half day re-rigging it for another take. We could also have built a miniature version that we could smash, so we'd have more control over rigging it. But the biggest problem for us overall was that if we were going to do it practically, we would then-from an animation point of view-be tied into those exact timings. We really didn't want to be in the position where we would have to make our bug hit the wall where the practical wall was being hit."
Another option was to create a computer-generated wall at the breaking point and match that to the actual wall on set. Hayes notes that "since the wall has a relatively repeated-type pattern, it offered the right opportunity to build it in the computer. That would give us the most control over deforming it, so we decided to bite the bullet and do a CG wall."
The modeling and animation of both the wall and the bugs were done using Softimage running on Silicon Graphics workstations. "We also used Amazon Paint and Adobe Photoshop for 3-D paint and RenderMan for rendering, plus our own in-house stuff mixed in," says Hayes.
Creating bugs that appear both realistically organic and believably gigantic "was a concern from the beginning," admits Hayes. "People are used to seeing bugs as small, so we spent a lot of time thinking about camera angles and other ways to imply that these things are big." He describes the menacing Tanker Bug, with its multiple levels of nasty-looking appendages, as "kind of a cross between a beetle and a half track-a piece of military equipment."
While computers allow for the easy replication of creatures, Tippett's animators faced the task of creating diversity, not just digital clones. Hayes notes that "we put a lot of work into what parameters we could vary within each one-we've got different dials for saturation, for hue, for contrast. We also had hundreds of walk cycles for the swarming bugs."
As the wall gives way under the battering ram pressure of the Tanker Bug, the shrapnel begins to fly. "A lot of the pieces of debris that come off are actually little bits that were hand-animated in the computer," explains Hayes. "It doesn't matter if it's done in a computer or not," he asserts. "Animating the little pieces and bending them off correctly still comes down to the skill of the animator."
Hayes also notes that "a lot of the debris that comes off the wall is particle debris." We spent a bit of time getting all this geometry into our Wavefront Dynamation particle system, where we could then, based on certain timing marks, launch a bunch of dust off the thing. In this sequence we're in a very dusty place, so we used dust whenever possible. We also mixed in a lot of dust elements that we shot on stage. I don't think there's any shot in the movie where we used computer elements exclusively; we always used photographic elements as well."
To believably merge the creatures and animated debris into the final shot, ground shadows were also added. "There was a lot of work involved in putting our bugs into an existing live action scene that had shadows in it already. We went through a lot of work to really determine the position of our lights," says Hayes, "and we faked them when necessary!"
Hayes, who worked on Starship Troopers for three years, says director Paul Verhoeven "was excellent at visualizing this stuff and working within the limitations. I don't think any other director has ever pushed this stuff quite so far."
Paul Verhoeven, director; For Tippett Studio: Phil Tippett, animation director, Craig Hayes, art director/visual effects supervisor, Blair Clark, character animator/modeler, Paula Lucchesi, lead painter, Larry Weis, technical director, Eric Leven, particle systems animator, Zoe Peck, compositor
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.